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Supporting research data management costs through grant funding

Making research data available to our stakeholders is very important to the Research Councils and, to ensure we have a consistent approach, there is a set of common principles, published by RCUK, which provides an overarching framework for individual Research Councils’ policies on data policy.

One of these principles states that it is “appropriate to use public funds to support the management and sharing of publicly-funded research data”. Research organisations are responsible for making sure there are enough resources allocated to research data management, for example from quality-related research funding or from research grants.

To help clarify how research grant funding can be used to help cover the costs involved, the JISC Research Data Managers Forum, with the Digital Curation Centre, organised a meeting in April this year, with representatives from the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust. RCUK have published responses to questions raised at the event.

In practice, this reiterates existing guidance on how research grants may be spent – all costs associated with research data management are eligible expenditure of research grant funds, but there are couple of ‘lines in the sand’ that are emphasised, and are worth repeating here:

no expenditure can be ‘double funded’ (a service that is centrally supported by the indirect costs paid on all research grants cannot then also be included as a direct cost on a grant)

all directly incurred expenditure of a grant must incurred before the end date of the grant.

RCUK hopes the written responses will dispel any misconceptions and provide reassurance that research grant funding from the Research Councils may be used to help with any aspect of the cost of research data management.